Without bothering to do my research, I gather this was Eminem's comeback album - or possibly one of them - and was as such subject to major slagging from whatever it is that we now have which tells us whether a record is good or bad. This is what I take from listening to Kamikaze and Music to Be Murdered By, the albums which followed Revival. Of course, given Eminem's tendency to wax bitterly about how everyone hated the previous record but can nevertheless suck his dick, I don't know how much reality supports the impression I've formed because I have only the music itself to go on - which is maybe as it should be.
I have a lot of time for Eminem and have been dutifully buying each one more or less as it comes out. That said, I honestly don't believe he's the greatest MC of all time, and while he's never put out a substandard record, I'm not sure he's ever quite unleashed an all-time classic in the sense of Ready to Die, Illmatic, or Revenge of the Barracuda - although admittedly that last one may well be according to just me and WC's mum.
To take these proposals in turn, the idea of there being a single greatest MC of all time strikes me as ridiculous* given that it would entail comparisons between rappers with very little stylistic common ground beyond residence in the same unusually broad arena; and because it would mean you'd have to ask fucking stupid questions such as whether Eminem is better than Ghostface or Jadakiss, for just two of many examples. The most we can say, surely, is simply that some lyricists are great, some are less great, and some are not conspicuously great. Our man patently belongs in the upper reaches of the first bunch.
Secondly, while he has a string of great albums to his name, I don't think there's one which didn't have at least a little room for improvement in some respect. Mostly it's been a certain homogeneity across the seventy minutes of each album - or however long they are - because even genius can get a bit repetitive when it's doing the same thing for more than an hour. As I believe is fairly well established by this point, Eminem has a stylistic leaning towards the confessional and unusually personal, hence all those cuts about how you were wrong about the previous album, you cloth-eared dumbfuck, and hence his entire familial life and the drama it has entailed narrated for our consideration, blow by blow, over the last couple of decades. I've sometimes felt the confessional focus has bordered on indulgent - like all those fucking autobiographical nineties indie comics about what it's like to write and draw an indie comic - but it's what Eminem does, and honestly he does it well, so there doesn't seem to be much point in grousing about it. Either you like it or you don't. To my ears, it's mostly been his own production which has been the problem - often great tracks in isolation, but a full hour of those plinky-plonky Addams Family beats can get on your nerves after a while.
Anyway, whatever it was, Revival gets everything right leaving no room for doubt. The beats have moved on from the Slim Shady sound, not quite throwing Em's lot in with the trap crowd, but close enough as to at least sound involved in the present state of the art, at least as of 2017; and it probably helps that Rick Rubin was involved. He's still fucking with that stadium rap thing where choruses tend to invoke a skyful of lighters, and suddenly it makes more sense than it did on previous albums. The jokes are still funny or horrible - depending on your mileage - and the familiar confessional is seasoned with pointed rage over the previous year's election and all which has since spilled forth from its bright orange diaper; so Revival does more than just one thing for an entire hour, and where it does anything familiar, it does it better than the last time we heard it. I genuinely believe this one might be up there with Illmatic and the rest.
*: Even including Rakim here, regardless of the views of elderly white men who haven't listened to rap since 1991 and yet who feel somehow qualified to opine on the same in statements habitually suffixed with in my humble opinion, despite that it never is.
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